February 28, 2010
IHEA 8th WORLD CONGRESS: Planned Enhancements for Toronto 2011
iHEA World Congresses have become the premiere international meeting for health economics research. They provide professional and academic interaction of a high order on a broad global basis, topical plenary presentations and a unique opportunity to meet researchers with similar interests from all regions, and to highlight the connections between policy, regulation, industry, and academic research. In response to feedback from the membership, iHEA will be introducing a number of enhancements to the structure of its congresses.
MINI-PLENARIES: Some sessions really do require a different venue; the session rooms being simply too small for the crowd or the topic being of particular value. As a result, we will experiment with converting some of the oral presentation times to “mini-plenaries.” The plan is to run 3 to 4 concurrent mini-plenaries.
AFFILIATE ASSOCIATION SESSIONS: Official iHEA affiliate associations will now have access to a dedicated presentation stream. While the content of these sessions will be up to the affiliate association, there will still be constraints to the number of sessions and each session must still go through the review process.
COMMITTEE SESSIONS: In addition to the competive (blinded) abstracts and the (unblinded) organized session proposals (themed abstracts or panels) the Congress Committee will organize a limited number of session proposals in advance on topics of special saliency.
POSTER SESSIONS: Poster presenters will have the opportunity to sign up for a short oral presentation with limited slides in a special lecture hall near the poster room(s).
OPEN CALL & ORGANIZED SESSIONS: Abstracts competitively selected through peer review by the Scientific Committee have been a successful mainstay of the iHEA congress, so no major changes in this component of the program are planned.
NEW DISCLOSURE STATEMENT: The fields of medicine and economics are seeing more and more concern over potential conflicts of interest and require more public disclosure. Submissions to the Toronto 2011 Congress will require enhanced (yet brief) statements on:
(1) Affiliations of all authors and sponsors, (2) Funding, (3) Previous presentations of the material submitted, and (4) other information that may signify a potential conflict or reasonably require disclosure.
